Liberals Tune Out

The Drudge Report notes that left-wing media aren’t faring too well at the moment. Crashing the Gate, by Markos Moulitsos of the Daily Kos, has sold an astonishingly low 3,630 copies, according to Nielsen’s Bookscan. And Air America’s already dismal New York ratings have plummeted another 30%.

I doubt that those data mean anything in particular. I think a lot of people are suffering from news fatigue. My guess is that more people will tune out politics as the weather warms up, and numbers generally for politics-related media will be down until the Congressional races get going in earnest in the fall.

UPDATE: Roger Simon has thoughts on these numbers, especially Kos’ book sales. His conclusion:

When it comes to politics these days, the public is not just fed up with Bush. It’s fed up with “all of the above.”

Roger does note, though, that Glenn Reynolds’ book is selling well.

ONE MORE: I was remiss in failing to note that not all political media are waning. Our friends at Bill Bennett’s radio show remind us that Bill has just signed a satellite radio deal. His show will now be appearing on Sirius Radio’s Patriot channel. Bill’s show debuted during the same week as Air America. Air America got the publicity, but Bill got the listeners. (This isn’t a big surprise, really, since Bill is about 50,000 times smarter than Al Franken and Randi Rhodes.) His audience has grown steadily, and the satellite outlet promises to add still more listeners.

Our traffic, for that matter, is up nearly 70% over a year ago. But I still think the summer will be a relatively quiet period on the web, barring major news developments.